Animal Armargeddon Episode 1: Death Rays
Earth, 450 million years ago, it is a thriving water world, filled with strange and amazing creatures, an ocean paradise, but a killer from space is heading this way. - Narrator "Throughout the earth's history, catastrophic events has caused numerous mass extinctions, but each time total annihilation seems inevitable, nature snaps back with remarkable resilience, these mass extinction are a brutal part of our past, and could be a part of our future. Who will live, and who will die ? The answers may surprise you." - Narrator Now witness the first mass extinction in the planet's history, Death Rays, on Animal Amargeddon. - Narrator It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. - Charles Darwin 1859 Our planet's first great mass extinction begins half a billion years ago, long before humans, long before even the dinosaurs. A controversial theory suggests this cataclysm could have started 6000 light years from Earth, a dying star in Milky Way, implodes and goes supernova. Massive beams of energy shoots from its poles, a gamma ray burst, these are the largest explosions in the known universe, the 10 second blast contains more energy than a thousand suns, the lethal rays rush violently through the cosmos at the speed of light, on a collision course with a small blue planet, Earth. - Narrator If we were close enough, it would blow the atmosphere off the planet. You were sitting one minute in this beautiful nice cloudy day, and then boom, where the air go, and it is literally blown off into space. - Dr. Peter Ward University of Washington Given the gamma ray burst are the them most destructive things that happen in the universe, if these things happen close enough, there's just no possibly that any type of life could survive such an event, it would literally eviscerate the entire surface of the planet, burn it to a crisp, nothing could survive. - Dr. Bruce Lieberman University of Kansas No one sure what caused this mass extinction, the gamma ray burst is one compelling theory, if true then the countdown to mass extinction of all life in planet Earth has begun. Thousands of light years from the rocketing death rays, Earth orbits peacefully, unaware of the impending doom, this is a glimpse 450 million years into the past, the Ordovician period, a vastly different world from today. - Narrator The continents as we know them now are still part of several land masses, Gondwana is composed of Australia, Africa, Southern Europe, Antarctica and South America. Fragments of North America, Western and Northern Europe are concentrated at the equator, the planet is warm and wet, with sea levels hundreds feet higher than they are now, the giant Panthalassic Ocean engulfs much of the Northern hemisphere, most of the U.S lies underwater beneath vast shallow oceans called epic continental seas. - Narrator Epic continental seas would be marine environment oceans that covers parts of the continent, and in the Ordovician, we had higher sea level and much of our continental area was covered with ocean. - Dr Mary Droser University of Carlifornia, Riverside The surface of this world is more like Venus than modern Earth, the oxygen level is so low, any animal would struggle for breath. - Narrator If you put a human, back in the Ordovician, the oxygen concentrations would have been such, that probably a simple walk on the beach, would have been very strenuous. The land would be extremely barren, that would pretty much look like the land looks today in places likes Death Valley, there's no green, no animals, because of that also, it's extremely quiet, none of the noises that we associated with animals, that you would hear in forest, like birds, even insects, none of that would have been present back in the Ordovician. - Dr. Bruce Lieberman University of Kansas The surface world may be desolate, but underwater, it's a different story. This rich seascape will one day be a desert, sitting under the Las Vegas Strip, for now, it's a bustling city in its own right, a vast coral reef teeming with inhabitants. - Narrator There is a perception I think, oh it's ancient, it's 500 million years old, it must have been empty, wasn't empty, it was full, it was just differently full than we have today. Certainly organisms were living in the deep sea, they were living in water calm, they were living in the sediment, on the sediment, and much of the Western U.S would have been a shallow marine habitat, much of the middle U.S Cincinnati, much of Appalachians would have been habitats that aren't equivalent to what we have today. - Dr Mary Droser University of California, Riverside Reefs just like these, span the globe, their warm sunlit waters are the perfect home for planet's rapidly evolving life-forms. Along these reefs, 2 foot long Trilobites scavenge for food, related to today's ants, these industrious creatures keep the sea floor clean, gobbling up almost anything they could find, dead plankton, bits of algae, even animal waste. They share their turf with a evolutionary new-comer Astraspis, one of only a few primitive fish species on Earth, just 6 inches long, this small creature could fit in the palm of your hand. But this animal has a mutation, never before seen on Earth, a primitive backbone, Astraspis fossils unearthed in the early 20th century revealed a (unknown) sheet along its back, used to protect a spinal cord, the very same structure is in our own bodies, it's hard to believe, but this lowly creature is the ancestor of every vertebrate on the planet today, birds, reptiles, mammals, man, our existence is entirely dependent on the survival of this single group, so far, the odds are not in its favor. - Narrator These are creatures which weren't very efficient in many ways, they certainly were not predators, they couldn't eat scum, and microbes, and algae and they were prey. - Dr. Peter Ward University of Washington At the other end of the food chain, a super predator rules the seas, merciless killer feared by all, the straight Nautiloid. - Narrator These are obligate carnivores, these are things that eat meat, and always want meat. A 12 footer would be unbelievably scary, you would swimming for your life, and this thing would be chasing you, and it would eat you if it could catch you. - Dr. Peter Ward University of Washington The great white shark of its time, the Nautiloid is a perfectly designed killing machine, up to 20 feet long with an insatiable hunger, a straight chamber shell filled with air keeps this 300 pound beast buoyant. It slices through the sea by inhaling water, then forcing it out through a small muscular tube at the base of the shell, it's the Ordovician world's version of a jet engine, but with a strange twist, Nautiloid swim far more efficiently backwards. - Narrator They have a jet propulsion system, so it's not a constant swimming like a fish, it's like a little piston, it swim, swim, swim, swim, swim, swim. You're in the water with a nautiloid, you see the back of the shell, you have the go all the way around it to see the swimming part, because the head, the tentacles, everything goes backwards. - Dr. Peter Ward University of Washington Though nautiloids reign supreme, there is competition, giant sea scorpions called eurypterids routinely challenge the nautiloids for the best feeding grounds. - Narrator As repulsive and hideous as land scorpions on land are, I think they won't hold a candle